Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Spring 2025  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Lachman, Gary, "The Vision of W.B. Yeats "   Quest 113:2, pg 18-22

By Gary Lachman

On the afternoon of October 24, 1917, just four days after their wedding, Georgie Hyde-Lees, the young bride of the middle-aged poet W.B. Yeats, decided to try her hand at automatic writing, the practice of allowing spirits to communicate through the written word.

The newlyweds were not unfamiliar with the spirit world. Yeats had for years explored it and other esoteric realms through his membership first in the Theosophical Society (during which he met H.P. Blavatsky) and then in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which counted among its devotees the notorious Aleister Crowley. Yeats had also attended seances and spent hours poring over reports from the Society of Psychical Research, searching for evidence of the unseen. Georgie too was well versed in astrology, folklore, and spiritualism, and was also a member of a later branch of the Golden Dawn.

But the impetus for this foray into the “other side” was something less scientific and altogether more personal. The newlyweds’ honeymoon was in danger of being aborted. Just three weeks earlier, Yeats’ offer of marriage had been rejected by Iseult Gonne, the young daughter of Maude Gonne, the actress and Irish revolutionary Yeats had loved for years. Now, on their own honeymoon, Georgie found the poet brooding and depressed over the rejection. One can only imagine how she felt, married on the rebound, and with a husband more than twice her age experiencing buyer’s remorse. (She was twenty-five; Yeats, fifty-two.)

Communicating with spirits might not seem the first option for livening up what threatened to become a regrettable situation. But Georgie knew that Yeats had an insatiable interest in the magical and mystical; she also knew that all good poets need a muse. If spirits couldn’t lift his spirits, nothing would.

            She was right. Almost as soon as she allowed her hand to hover over the blank page, messages came from entities Yeats would call “the instructors.” “What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing,” Yeats wrote, “was so exciting, sometimes so profound,” that he persuaded his young bride to devote a few hours a day to receiving these messages. What emerged so convinced Yeats of its importance that after spending some days studying the material, he declared that he would devote “what remained of life to explaining and piecing together” these mysterious communications.

The spirits (or whoever was responsible for the messages) disagreed. “No,” they said (there was often more than one communicator), “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry” (Yeats, 8).

As the poet and Yeats scholar Kathleen Raine points out, this caveat has allowed scores of literary critics to ignore Yeats’ genuine dedication to the philosophia perennis, seeing it only as material for his verse. Although much of Yeats’ poetry is opaque without a knowledge of its roots in his Hermetic studies, those studies were undertaken not solely to acquire poetic metaphors but to gain knowledge of the mysteries behind the sensible world. As Georgie’s hand, guided by her instructors, scribbled furiously, Yeats saw that a good deal of that knowledge was coming through in spades.

Soon it was decided that writing was too laborious, so the spirits took to communicating by voice. Georgie would sink into a half-sleep (the hypnagogic state that Yeats himself often explored), and speak—or, rather, the spirits would: different ones at different times. Throughout these proceedings, and during the years they took place (the voices stopped in 1920) all sorts of poltergeist phenomena appeared: strange whistling, smells of incense, violets, or roses, but also burnt feathers and, even more pungently, cat droppings.

What also seems like classic poltergeist behavior is the admission by the spirits that they would deceive Yeats if they could. Often communication would be stalled because of the interference of spirits Yeats called “the frustraters,” who would relate misinformation (much as we find on social media). Yeats came to see the truth of the remark by his contemporary G.K. Chesterton that, whatever the source of the phenomena taking place at seances, one thing was true: it told lies—something Blavatsky had said years earlier.

Nevertheless, Yeats discovered that material from these semitrance states seemed to relate to an idea he had put forth in his early poetry collection Per Amica Silentia Lunae: some men develop through their battles with themselves, others through their battles with the world (what Jung would have called the “introverted” or “extraverted” paths).

The spirits took up this notion, and with it developed what Yeats called “an elaborate classification of men” according to their type. That elaborate classification ultimately became one of the most fascinating, if baffling, attempts at an esoteric knowledge system in modern times. Yeats put forth this system in his work, simply entitled A Vision.

A Vision appeared in different editions, with many changes, alterations, and additions between them. It was first privately printed in 1926, in an edition of 600 copies distributed to subscribers. It received few reviews and made little impression at the time. A Vision appeared again in 1937, in a very different form than its first edition. (It is this edition that I refer to here.) In 2008, the original 1926 version appeared as volume 13 of the Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, published by Scribner.

At first, Yeats’ attitude to the work was somewhat casual, almost apologetic, rather like C.G. Jung’s attitude to his monumental but highly personal journal The Red Book. (Indeed Yeats and Jung, although ostensibly ignorant of each other’s work, had much in common, including an equivocal public attitude toward the occult, as we see in James Olney’s 2022 book The Rhizome and the Flower). Although Yeats made no secret of his interest in spiritualism, Theosophy, and other esoteric studies, he retained a highly skeptical mind, something that comes through in his poetry.

Eventually, the material Georgie produced would fill some fifty notebooks, thousands of pages containing not only the messages from the “instructors,” but also strange geometric designs. These symbolized the processes that Yeats came to see at work not only in the lives of individual men and women, but also in what they would experience in the afterlife. Moreover, the system emerging in A Vision was full of historical cycles, hearkening back to the ancient idea of the Great Year and the ages of gold and iron, but also reminiscent of that remarkable work by Yeats’ German contemporary Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West. Spengler argued that the civilization which had emerged from the Renaissance, and had been dominant since, was at an end. (The first volume of the book appeared at the end of World War I, apparently corroborating Spengler’s idea.) Yeats agreed, but the coming “new age” predicted in A Vision differed considerably from the one that Spengler believed was on its way.

As the material grew, the spirits asked Yeats to help them by reading deeply in philosophy, history, and the esoteric traditions, something with which he was already very familiar. Communication continued through his and Georgie’s dreams, but the more Yeats read, the more complex and baffling the messages became. The dialogue proceeded in the form of questions and answers, Yeats asking for clarification of some point in the preceding exchange, and the voices picking up from there. In a sense, Yeats was trying to create his own form of astrology. He had once asked whether it were possible for a “prophet” to “prick upon the calendar the birth of a Napoleon or Christ” (Yeats, 9). Yet the elements in this system were not the constellations and planets, although, as the scope of the communications expanded, they too would find themselves brought into the mix.

The fundamental elements of Yeats’ system are the twenty-eight phases of the moon, the four “faculties” that he ascribes to men and women which determine their path in life, and the strange “gyres,” or spiralling patterns, represented by intersecting cones, with the apex of one touching the base of the other, each one turning in the opposite direction (deosil and widdershins, or clockwise and counterclockwise), as if each cone were screwing itself into the other. The “objective” cone relates to space; the “subjective” cone to time. The “subjective” cone is one of emotion and the “inner” world; the “objective” cone is one of reason and the “outer” world. Their intersection is a kind of perpetual tussle, with one gaining the upper hand only to lose it to the other, which loses it in turn, and so on. The “objective” cone possesses what Yeats calls a “primary tincture”; the subjective cone, an “antithetical” one. “Tincture” here means a kind of “essence.” The “primary tincture” is one of law and logic; the “antithetical tincture” is one of imagination and emotion.

Gyres appear in Yeats’ poetry. “The Second Coming,” perhaps his most famous poem, begins: “Turning and turning in widening gyres / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The poem announces the end of one age and the beginning of another: a more brutal one, when “things fall apart,” “the centre cannot hold,” and “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yeats believed that when one civilization has reached its end, an opposite or, as he calls it, “antithetical” one begins; he refers to the Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who believed that the fundamental reality was the eternal struggle between “discord” and “love,”  fragmentation and unity, and that in different ages one or the other is dominant. According to Yeats, after two millennia the Christian era is reaching its end, and an age, not of love but something less comforting, is “slouching toward Bethlehem” to be born. It isn’t coincidental that Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War. Its twenty-two lines convey the gist of Spengler’s massive tome with concentrated force.

The gyres represent not only historical cycles, but also the patterns of individual lives. Individuals themselves, as mentioned, possess four “faculties,” which Yeats calls “Will,” “Mask,” “Creative Mind,” and “Body of Fate.” Yeats’ four “faculties” bear comparison with Jung’s four functions: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition.

Although exactly what Yeats’s faculties are is (like much else in A Vision) explained rather vaguely—the compactness of much of Yeats’ poetry is rarely present in his prose—we can, I think, get a rough idea of what he means.

By Will we can understand the sort of person one is: bold, shy, hedonistic, ascetic, emotional, withdrawn, and so on.

For Yeats, the Mask is the face one wears in public; as his fellow poet T.S. Eliot says in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” we “prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet.” Jung knew of the Mask too: he called it the “persona,” which is often very different from what he called “the Self.”

Creative Mind is one’s inherent creative style—contemplative poet or histrionic self-dramatist, bohemian artist or disciplined musician.

Body of Fate seems self-explanatory. It is destiny, or rather, the life events against which one fulfils one’s destiny—or not. Both the Mask and the Creative Mind can be expressed in their “true” form or their “false” one.

 The four “faculties” are perched, as it were, on the opposite ends of the base of each cone. Picture two triangles intersecting each other, their apexes sideways, with Will and Creative Mind at the opposite bottom corners of one, and Body of Fate and Mask in the same position on the other.

If this isn’t complicated enough, the gyres turn, and the four faculties engage in a kind of struggle, either internal or external, against the backdrop of the twenty-eight phases of the moon. Along with the illustrations of the opposing cones, Yeats provides what he calls the “Great Wheel” of the lunar cycle.

This starts at Phase One, the new moon, which Yeats calls a state of “complete objectivity.” As the moon waxes, it passes through the next phases until we reach Phase Fifteen, the full moon, which is “complete subjectivity.” As in Phase One, in Phase Fifteen, “Unity of Being,” is achieved. As the phases continue, with the moon waning, counterclockwise, that unity is lost, until at Phase Twenty-Two, a stage of “the breaking of strength,” fragmentation sets in.

To show how this process appears in individual lives, Yeats offers examples, some of famous literary or political figures, some no longer so well known, some just abstract types, referring to “a certain actress” or “some beautiful women.” (Once again, the similarity to Jung is clear: A Vision can be read as Yeats’ Psychological Types, the book in which Jung illustrates the different types of personality created by the interaction of his four functions, and the opposition of the introverted and extraverted attitudes toward life.)

As an example of an individual at Phase Twelve, Yeats offers the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Yeats, 126‒29). Yeats calls the Will at Phase Twelve “the Forerunner,” which seems apt for Nietzsche’s belief that he was writing for the future: as he says in The Anti-Christ, “only the day after tomorrow belongs to me” (Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, 114). Nietzsche looked to the future for the arrival of the Übermensch, or “overman”—often translated as “superman”—an individual embodying the next stage in human evolution. If expressed truthfully, the Mask at this phase is “self-exaggeration.” Nietzsche’s remark that he was not a man, but “dynamite,” and that he philosophized with a “hammer” may seem on target here. If expressed falsely, the Mask is self-abandonment; does Nietzsche’s tragic collapse into madness qualify here?

A true Creative Mind at Phase Twelve produces “subjective philosophy,” which most academic philosophers would agree characterizes Nietzsche’s work. If false, it results in a “war between two forms of expression.” This doesn’t seem immediately clear until we remember that in his last years, Nietzsche labored to write a magnum opus, a systematic presentation of his philosophy, spelling out what he called the “revaluation of all values.” Yet he was unable to complete it; what he left in his notebooks was published after his death as The Will to Power. Instead, he reverted to form (he was never a systematic thinker) and in a flurry of frenzied writing, produced the incandescent works of his last days, including Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and his strange autobiography, Ecce Homo, all short works written in his aphoristic, “telegraphic” style, in which he attempted to say in “ten words” what others “do not say in a whole book.”

The Body of Fate at this phase is one of “enforced intellectual action,” which sums up Nietzsche’s life; as he wrote in The Gay Science, “I still live; I still think. I still have to live, for I still have to think.” (Nietzsche, Gay Science, 223).

Phase Thirteen gives us “the Sensuous Man” as characteristic of the Will at this phase. The examples Yeats gives again seem to suit. He offers the French poet Charles Baudelaire  (1821‒65), as well as two of Yeats’s contemporaries, the poet Ernest Dowson (1867‒1900) and the artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872‒98). All were indeed “sensuous” men. Dowson, an opium addict and alcoholic who died at thirty-two, was a fellow poet, one of the “decadent” school of the late nineteenth century, whom Yeats called “the tragic generation.” Dowson is most remembered today for the poignant lines from his poem “Vitae Brevis Summa”: “They are not long, the days of wine and roses: / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream.”

Beardsley was associated with “the naughty nineties,” with Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book, famous for its fin de siècle eroticism. His fine black-and-white illustrations, frequently featuring sexual and what we today would call “transgressive” subjects, scandalized his contemporaries.

Baudelaire can be considered the father of the decadent movement, of which Dowson and Beardsley, a couple of generations later, were a part. As its title suggests, Les Fleurs du Mal, “The Flowers of Evil,” Baudelaire’s most famous work, celebrated the dark, seductive attraction of sin and the forbidden. Like Dowson, Baudelaire experimented with drugs and was a member of the notorious Club des Hashichins in Paris, along with Victor Hugo, Arthur Rimbaud, and Honoré de Balzac.

The Mask in this phase in its true form is “Self-expression,” which Baudelaire certainly achieved. Yet the false form, “Self-absorption,” may suggest his obsession with sin. Certainly the false form of the Creative Mind, “morbidity,” suggests this preoccupation, since for all his celebration of evil, Baudelaire was crushed by a perpetual sense of being cursed.

The Body of Fate of this phase, “Enforced love of another,” fits his profile too. For years Baudelaire was enthralled by the mulatto woman Jeanne Duval and dependent on a masochistic relationship with her. Although beautiful and exotic, Jeanne was illiterate, unfaithful, malicious, and for most of the time drunk. Sadly, like Nietzsche, Baudelaire succumbed to syphilis, dying at the age of forty-six.

Other examples seem equally apt. At Phase Twenty we find “the Concrete Man,” with Shakespeare, Balzac, and Napoleon as examples (Yeats, 151). We might find this an odd assortment, but the “worlds” of all three were very “concrete.” Shakespeare’s and Balzac’s worlds are the epitomes of a kind of literary realism, with all the varieties of human characters appearing in Shakespeare’s plays and Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Both created densely populated fictional realms—Promethean attempts to reproduce real life in words. And the “concreteness” of Napoleon’s “world,” that of the Europe he conquered, seems self-evident.

Phase Twenty-One gives us “the Acquisitive Man,” whom Yeats exemplifies in his contemporaries, the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the novelist H.G. Wells (Yeats, 154). Neither was acquisitive in the usual sense of the world, of acquiring possessions or money, although both were very successful. Both did acquire vast learning and knowledge, and both looked toward socialism, which they regarded as a rational, logical approach to politics, as the cure for the acquisitive society in which they lived. Yeats considered them both as examples of the age of logic and reason that he believed (or at least hoped) was coming to an end.

Although they often disagreed on the details, Shaw and Wells believed in the notion of progress, of society’s advance through intelligence and reason. By contrast, as Kathleen Raine writes, Yeats “foretold a New Age which was to be characterised by a reversal of the premises on which our post-Renaissance civilization is founded” (Raine, From Blake to “A Vision,” 5).  Those premises were the body of ideas that were introduced with the rise of science and the materialism that followed.

Yeats shared Spengler’s idea that there is no such progress, that “Greece was no advance on Persia”; nor was the “scientific age” a sign of progress over the “age of faith” it followed. For Yeats, it was more of a sign of “regress,” and he considered three centuries of scientific materialism as “provincial” when compared to the millennia of belief in the reality of spirit that preceded them.

Civilizations come to an end, Yeats believed, when “they have given all their light, like burnt out wicks,” and, like Spengler, Yeats thought our own candle was just about out (Raine, W.B. Yeats, 2). Although poems like “The Second Coming” seem to announce a darker time, Yeats did foresee a return of an age of imagination and poetry after one of logic, mechanics—the quantifiable universe of Newton. He did not prick upon a calendar a date for its arrival  (although A Vision is full of references to the Platonic year, the precession of the equinoxes, and other versions of cyclical time), but he did believe it was on its way.

Had Yeats lived to see the occult revival of the 1960s, in which his influence and that of his fellow members of the Golden Dawn would play no small part, and in which the coming age of Aquarius featured prominently, he might have thought his prediction was coming true. Those heady days are long past, and it is nearly a century since A Vision was first published. But it seems clear that we are going through some shift in history in our own time. Let’s hope it will bring something closer to what Yeats had in mind in A Vision, rather than that rough beast making its way to Bethlehem.

---

Sources

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

———. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977.

Olney, James. The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy—Yeats and Jung. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022.

Raine, Kathleen. From Blake to “A Vision.” Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1979.

———. W.B. Yeats and the Learning of the Imagination. Ipswich, UK: Golgonooza Press, 1999.

Yeats, W.B. A Vision. New York: Collier, 1970.

Gary Lachman, a longtime contributor to Quest, is the author of several books about consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition, including Dreaming ahead of Time; The Return of Holy Russia; Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump; Lost Knowledge of the Imagination; and Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. His latest book, Maurice Nicoll: Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way, was reviewed in Quest, winter 2025.

---

Printed in the  Spring 2025  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "How to Think Impossibly: An Interview with Jeffrey Kripal "   Quest 113:2, pg 12-17

By Richard Smoley 

Jeffrey J. Kripal, who holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, is one of today’s most intrepid explorers of the implications of psychic and spiritual research. His works include The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities and Esalen: The Religion of No Religion. His most recent book is How to Think Impossibly about Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (University of Chicago Press), which discusses the need to accept the fact of paranormal experiences and how to deal with them intellectually and theoretically. Following is an edited version of a Zoom interview with him (the original can be viewed on YouTube).

 

Richard Smoley: In How to Think Impossibly, you argue that mainstream thought and mainstream science have disregarded, denied, and sneered at all paranormal experiences. You’re saying that at this point we ought to take these things seriously, at least phenomenologically. That is to say, people are really having these experiences, and we need to know what they mean, both to those people and about what they may be telling us about reality.

Jeffrey Kripal: That’s a good summary. I’m also trying to say that these phenomena clearly mean something: they’re trying to get our attention. They’re happening for reasons that we don’t know, but we’re being called to interpret them and tell stories out of them. That’s the deeper argument of the book. But you’ve got to take them as actually happening—as part of our reality—before you can even get to the second stage.

Smoley: It can be dangerous to do that academically. You discuss the case of the late John Mack in some detail, who did exactly what you’re recommending. He was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard. He did a lot of research on first-person UFO encounters and abductions. And he did something that was close to impossible at Harvard: he almost lost tenure. This shows what a witch hunt this kind of investigation can launch.

Kripal: I know a bit about the John Mack case. John did address these phenomenological accounts in a direct way. He was a psychiatrist at Harvard, as you mentioned, which means he was in the scientific or medical world. I’m in the humanities or the study of religion, which nobody cares about, basically, and they don’t think we know anything anyway.

I think part of John’s scandal was that he was saying these things in the heart of the medical, scientific community. He was challenging not just his peers, but the materialist worldview in general. I think that’s why he was literally put on trial: they did try to take his tenure away. They did try to fire him. The university ultimately pulled back from that case, but the impact certainly stayed with him and with the community.

That was the 1990s. This is the 2020s. Thirty years have gone by. The world is certainly not healed or in a great place at the moment, but it’s in a different place when it comes to these phenomena, including UFOs, or what they now call UAPs [unexplained aerial phenomena].

I also think it’s different that someone like myself is in the humanities and not the sciences. I think there’s a politics of knowledge in place: a physicist or a chemist has a much harder time saying these things during their careers. They tend to say them after retirement, when there are no more consequences. Before then, there might be severe consequences in terms of grants, promotion, and tenure.

I’m often asked, how do you deal with all the pushback? My reply is always, what pushback? I don’t get a lot of pushback. I strongly suspect that intellectuals— certainly in my own world—are in the closet on this subject. They’re not resistant to the fact that these things happen or to the call to interpret them differently. They’re afraid of sounding like the tabloids, so they don’t speak about this topic. It’s ignored.

I think there’s actually a lot of support for this conversation, but it tends to be behind the scenes: “It’s OK if Jeff says those things; Jeff’s weird anyway. But I don’t want to say those things, because I don’t want to stand in front of the curtain and not get promoted or not get the grant.”

Smoley: There’s an enormous amount of discussion today about intellectual freedom on campus. You’re basically saying that the strictures on intellectual freedom in the academic world are much more pervasive and much more enmeshing than is generally acknowledged. Would you agree with that?

Kripal: First of all, I’m a real promoter of intellectual freedom. I think it really exists on the campuses, and I think it’s part of who intellectuals are. I don’t think it’s perfect, and there are all kinds of strictures on it, some of which are good, some of which are probably not good. It’s like any other social space. There are ways to speak and there are ways not to speak. But there tends to be more freedom in the academic space than in the public space, the religious space, or the political space.

 In my own field, the study of religion, most of us began in religious communities, where we did not feel the intellectual freedom to ask the questions we wanted to ask. So we backed into the only institution that would have us: the academy, where we’re encouraged and rewarded to ask those questions, and sometimes even to answer them. So I would say, it’s not a perfect world, but it’s pretty darn good.

Smoley: My impression of mainstream Anglo-American philosophy is that it is almost totally in bondage to secular materialism. I have a degree in philosophy myself, although it’s forty-five years old. I never got a sense that there was any intellectual freedom among philosophers to discuss these things. They’re like annoying little brothers running after science, saying, “Hey, we’re scientific too!” Could you comment on that?

Kripal: At Rice University, we don’t have any religious affiliation, and we’re not here to promote religious views. But I do think there’s more freedom to ask these questions in a department of religion than in a department of philosophy. I think you are spot-on about Anglo-American philosophy, but I don’t inhabit that space. I’m in a discipline that’s much wilder and frankly, much freer than Anglo-American philosophy.

Smoley: It’s a funny little impasse we’ve gotten to. Philosophy was alive and interesting when it was a bunch of Greeks wasting time in the marketplace. Now that it’s all professorized, it’s almost completely dead. It’s my impression that academic philosophy is not taken seriously, even in mainstream thought.

 Kripal: I started out my intellectual career in a Catholic seminary, and we were all required to minor in philosophy if we didn’t actually major in it. The history of philosophy and the history of theology are very intertwined. I personally think religious studies is philosophically rich and astute, but really complicated, because we tend to look at religious experiences that involve altered states and human agency in a way that is not normally taken into consideration in a philosophy department. It’s richer than that in the study of religion.

Smoley: Let’s go on to something philosophical. The viewpoint that you’re espousing in your book is what you call dual aspect monism. Could you say a little bit about that?

Kripal: It’s tentative: I hold out that ontology lightly, as it were. But I do think it helps explain a lot of the material.

Essentially, I’m suggesting that one’s worldview informs what one keeps on the table and what one takes off the table. Secular materialism essentially takes everything off the table that I’m personally interested in. Then it says, “I can explain everything on the table.” My reply: “You can explain everything because you just took everything off.”

In the philosophy of mind, there’s something we call the hard problem of consciousness: how do you explain consciousness or mind in a materialist worldview? How do you start with little bits of matter and get to mentality or subjectivity? Of course you can’t.

There are all kinds of philosophical solutions to that question, one of which is dual aspect monism. It essentially says that the world is one. There’s a monism behind the curtain, as it were, but as human knowers, we split reality into a mental and a material dimension. In itself, it’s not so split. It’s one reality.

This philosophical approach is called dual aspect monism, because ontologically, things are one, but epistemologically, things are two. The mental and the material are both split off from this deeper unity.

I like dual aspect monism because there are many situations where the material world corresponds perfectly with the mental world. That can be explained in a dual-aspect monistic worldview, because they both split off from the same thing. We can talk about that in a pretty rigorous way with dual aspect monism. Secular materialism is also a monism, but it’s a material monism: the mental world is simply an emergent property of a deeper material reality.

Smoley: Many of the ideas you advance in your book can be found in the world’s esoteric traditions. How can they inform the understanding that you’re talking about?

Kripal: I think the experiences that I discuss in the book occur in all cultures at all times. This deeper reality, this one world, is being accessed in these experiences. But those experiences are always mediated or translated by the imagination, which is informed by the human knower and cultural traditions like the Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, or the Christian mystical tradition. There’s going to be a lot of complexity and nuance and differences, which are primarily due to the human beings through whom this one world is mediated.

I’m not a perennialist in the sense that I think these religions are all tending towards this one world. I think religions tend towards their own goals, which are conflicting. But I do think human beings have experiences of this one world. Whether these individuals lived in the first century or the twenty-first, their experiences are all expressions of the same reality. So you’re going to see both similarities and real differences.

Smoley: One thinker you mention often in your book is Henry Corbin.*  Could you talk about his work and how it has influenced your own thought?*

Kripal: Corbin was a French scholar of Iranian mystical thought who died in 1978. To capture the sense of this middle world, he used the word imaginal. It’s not imaginary, but it’s not purely physical either. It’s a world where the spiritual world mediates with the physical world and creates spiritual forms.

Corbin was a docetic Christian thinker, by which I mean he did not believe that God truly became a human being: the humanity of Christ was a seeming, a kind of show or display; it wasn’t real.

Frankly, that limits Corbin for me. He wants to separate the monotheistic truth of things from the human flesh, from history, and from all of the things that I think we are as well. I see his concept of the imaginal as an attempt to relate monotheistic transcendence to fleshly immanence. Christian theology did it in a very different way. I’m not voting on one or the other. But I do think that the docetism is a limitation for Corbin.

Smoley: This discussion makes me think of the concept of imagination in Blake and Coleridge. Blake seems to be saying some things that sound very much like Corbin, such as that imagination is true perception. How do you see the connections there?

Kripal: In my book, there’s a whole section on Romantic poetry and Blake and Coleridge. They had a very different conception of the imagination than most of us do today.

I once hosted a seminar, and I asked everybody to come with two things: a story of something exotic or extraordinary that happened to them, and a theory of the imagination to make some sense out of that exotic event. Pretty much everybody came with an exotic story, but no one came with a theory of the imagination.

Today I think we lack a strong theory of the imagination. We think of the imagination as the imaginary, as hallucination.

We have lost the sense that it might be a feature or a function of consciousness or mind, and that these visions might be mediations or translations of something very real. We just don’t go there. We either go to literal belief and concretize these visions, or we go to the debunking strategy and call them hallucinations. Or we don’t think about them at all.

Smoley: So according to theorists like Corbin, there is imagination as conventionally conceived, which is fantasy, daydreaming, and so on. Then there is an imaginal world that’s not imaginary: it’s an objective world on a different plane. Experience of that is as objective on that level as physical experience. Is that more or less accurate, according to your understanding?

Kripal: I think that’s Corbin; I’m not sure that’s me. I’ll give you an example that explains why that doesn’t work so well. People who have had near-death experiences talk to me, and they’ll tell me about their apparition of the afterlife, and—to use their language—it’s more real than real. But these experiences are all different. Every single one of them is different. So I cannot personally sign my name to visionary display A, because then I can’t sign my name to B, C, D, E, or F. In other words, if I literally believe any one of those displays, I’m locked out of every other human experience of that reality.

I think there is an afterlife. Consciousness does survive the body; I have no problem with that. But I think near-death experiences are forms of the imagination that are mediating some other reality. How that’s happening, I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody else knows. I don’t think we have a model of that.

Smoley: I find the contradictions among near-death experiences a little bit less troubling, because let’s take India: Any number of people go to India. Some people go to one part, some people to another part. Some people love it; others hate it. But there’s still an India there; the fact that everyone’s perceptions of it are very different doesn’t invalidate the other perceptions.

Kripal: Yeah, but the afterlife’s not like India. You and I can both go to the same city in India and see the same things. We could come back and talk about what’s on a particular street.

When you talk to near-death experiencers, though, some are one-life models and some are multilife models. Well, which is it?

Some reincarnation models are very different than one-life models. Sure, there are ways to coordinate them if you want, but they sit in tension. I just want to admit the tension. I don’t want to explain it away, as saying the afterlife is one thing and everybody’s having a different experience of that. They’re experiencing different realities, coming back, and claiming very different things about the human soul, about what a human life is, and what the end is.

That’s where I’m going with this. It’s not a solution; I don’t have a solution. I just want us to have a conversation.

Smoley: I think we could both agree that probably no one has ultimate answers, and the people who think they do may be the most dangerous ones of all. One of the things that most struck me in your book was a postmortem quote from John Mack. Apparently some medium called up his shade, and he said, “It’s not what we thought.” What do you make of that?

Kripal: I think John saying, “It’s not the extraterrestrial hypothesis.” He doesn’t say that, I know, but you asked me what I thought; that’s what I think. With the abduction material, most people go with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I hear John saying, “That’s actually not what’s going on.”

I certainly think that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is  not what’s going on. It’s a modern mythology; it’s a frame, a mediation.

For example, the role of souls in these abduction experiences is a major one, and I think the abduction experience is very much about the life of the soul and the afterlife.

It reminds me of two moments in the modern literature that fascinate me. One is when an alien spacecraft appeared to one Officer Sherman in Nebraska. The alien got out of the craft and said something like, “We want you to believe in us, but not too much.” To me, that’s wisdom.

The other moment is when anthropologist Michael Harner talks about a shamanic psychedelic trip he went on, and he met the dragon beings that supposedly control space and time. He came back and told his teachers about that. They said, “Well, that’s what they always say.”

To me, that sense of humor and that sense of “don’t believe what you believe” is the key. It’s frustrating for people who want to hold on to a particular belief or worldview. But it’s precisely what I mean by the phrase “how to think impossibly.” You’re stepping out of your belief system. You’re stepping out of your worldview in order to look back and think about it in a more reflexive way.

Smoley: We’ve been talking about UFOs in terms of human encounters, but then we have to deal with aerial phenomena. Pilots are seeing these things flying alongside their craft. One day NASA seems to believe in them, and the next day NASA doesn’t. How would you comment on this?

Kripal: There are a number of ways to read that. One is to say that a lot of physical things happen in the history of religions: objects materialize; people fly. So it doesn’t surprise me that you have these physical traces.

That’s one option. Another is to say that premodern religious experiences may be experiences of something that’s ultimately physical. Now technology has advanced to the extent where we could actually see these things, when we couldn’t before. But they were always there.

It’s strange. Beings come out of the sky and do things to human beings: that’s called religion. That’s also the UFO phenomenon. I think there is a profound connection between humanity’s religious experiences and the civilizations that they formed around them. Today it’s what we call UFOs or UAPs. That is not to say that our modern mythology is true and the premodern mythologies are false. I think that’s the mistake people fall into. They think, “We have it now. These are beings from some other star system, or spacecraft.” No, that’s just your Cold War sci-fi mythology at work. That’s not actually what’s going on here. There’s something else that’s more profound than that—and, frankly, weirder.

Smoley: Thank you. Let’s go on to something completely different. An early book of yours is about Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which has been very seminal in promoting new thought. I wonder if you could talk about it. You’ve obviously studied it very deeply, and you know a lot of the major players.

Kripal: Esalen is essentially my spiritual home. I’m still involved in the place. I sit on the board and help guide the institute.

Esalen, as an institute, was founded in 1962,  and it became one of the epicenters of what later became the counterculture. Esalen became a place where a lot of teachers came to teach their teachings and try them out on individuals.

Esalen became famous for its promotion of what became known as human potential, which refers to abilities or powers of the human being that aren’t really developed yet, but that manifest in particular moments. Esalen became famous for developing techniques and teachings that could cause these human potentials to show themselves.

Pretty much everyone in this spiritual world was there in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. It really was the place to be, and it’s still very active.

Smoley: The human potential movement seems to go back and forth, sometimes not very clearly, between two poles. One has to do with developing human potential, or, as the Theosophists say, the powers latent in man—that is, we already have these powers; we just need to develop them. Sometimes they seem to talk in evolutionary terms: these powers are something we’re going to evolve. It’s not always clear what they’re talking or thinking about in this regard. Could you clarify that a little?

Kripal: The short answer is no. Who is the they, Richard? Certainly Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen, has an evolutionary, esoteric worldview. There’s no question about that. But Aldous Huxley, another seminal figure, didn’t. Huxley didn’t think evolution had anything to do with these human potentials. It just depends on whom you’re talking about.

Among other things, Esalen has been about uniting the sciences and spirituality and trying to figure out if evolutionary biology had something to do with these human potentials—and if we could combine them in some way.

By the way, physics was big there as well, including quantum physics. There was a whole series of meetings about the physics of consciousness in the late seventies and early eighties, and they were really influential. So I think it depends on the science and the individual you’re talking about.

Smoley: Apparently I irritated Michael Murphy in my review of his book The Future of the Body for a magazine I edited called Gnosis. I suggested that his model of evolution was more Lamarckian than Darwinian, which, in today’s discourse, is fighting words. But it is, you know: if you’re developing your own evolution, you’re acquiring characteristics. This is not random Darwinian mutation, right?

Kripal: Right. I think your Lamarckian comments are actually pretty faithful to contemporary biology. We’re talking about epigenetics now, and the role of culture and practice in evolution. I think there’s probably an opening in modern biology there.

When people have some experience of the ultimate meaning of life, some kind of cosmic consciousness, they’re going to understand it as the pinnacle of human evolution. If they live in an evolutionary worldview, they’re going to place that at the end of the evolutionary track, not at the beginning.

I’m very sympathetic to that move. I don’t live in the Catholic worldview of Dante and my medieval ancestors. I’m a modern person. I live after Darwin and after Freud. I live in the big bang. I assume that we live in a universe that’s about fourteen billion years old and has been evolving for that long. If I were to have an experience of God, I’m sure I would place it as the goal of evolution as well. I think that’s where these evolutionary esotericisms come from: people experiencing altered states and drawing conclusions from them based on the natural science of the day.

Smoley: Since this is an interview for the Theosophical Society, could you give me an objective outsider’s impression of the Theosophical Society, past and present?

Kripal: I like to joke that if you walk down any alley, you’re going to find Mme. Blavatsky or Emanuel Swedenborg. The Theosophical tradition has been incredibly informative in shaping modern spirituality—far more than people outside the Theosophical tradition generally realize.

Today, of course, the Theosophical tradition doesn’t have a massive presence in modern thought or institutions, but it once did, and it shaped a lot of what we still do today. I have a profound appreciation of its historical influence, but also a recognition that it is no longer a major cultural force, as it once was.

Smoley: I think for people today in the Theosophical Society, there’s a sense of, “What happened, and what can we do to get that back?”

Kripal: I went on a tour for my Esalen book after it came out. The question I was asked the most was, “How do we do this again?”

In other words, how do we have the counterculture again? My reply was, “You don’t.” The zeitgeist, the features that made the counterculture, were specific to that time period, and this time period is different.

I’m a historian of religions. All of these movements them go away at some point, and then other movements come up. That’s just the nature of the history of religions.

I’m just a teacher, and my concern is always one of legacy. How do we pass teachings on to the next generation? How do we pass wisdom on? How do we pass the truths of one generation on to the next?

Institutions sometimes get a bad name, but they’re really important for passing truths on. I work at a university. It’s been around for 100 years. Hopefully, it’ll be around many more hundreds of years, and it does what it does because of its stability and its history. I think religious traditions are a lot like that. They can do things that other cultural forms can’t.

Young people today often will describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. I think it’s a kind of moral placeholder. They don’t like what religion has done to their friends, usually along gender or sexuality lines. But I think that view is rather naive in terms of institutional stability and what they’ll do with their children, or their children’s children spiritually or religiously. Those are big questions, for which we often don’t have good answers in this esoteric or spiritual space.

Smoley: To make the matter personal, how do you convey your knowledge and values to your students? What do you try to bring out in them?

Kripal: I do that every day in the classroom; that’s my personal answer to this question. I also write books, and books are amazing things. They work on souls whether you’re there or not, and even whether you’re alive or not. That’s why I put so much effort and time into books. They’ll be there after we’re gone.

I also try to impress on my students that religion is not about sitting in a hard pew and believing something. You no longer believe. It’s about altered states, and it’s about human beings trying to institutionalize these altered states and turn them into culture.

Smoley: What are you working on now?

Kripal: I’m working on a book on physics. I want to know why people turn to those models today to make sense of their spiritual experiences. I’m not writing a book about physics: obviously I’m not a physicist. But I’m writing about the cultural reception, or the history of how people use physics to talk about their spiritual experiences.

Physics has a kind of elite status in our world that the study of history or literature or religion does not. I think that’s part of the answer. Moreover, quantum physics is very weird. It doesn’t make any sense, so it can be used to talk about things that are weird or that don’t seem to make any sense. That doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing, but it might mean that they’re related. Of course, we have not created culture or poetry, or religion or philosophy, out of quantum physics. We’ve created them out of Newtonian physics. I think that’s a big problem.

Smoley: How do you see religion in America evolving and developing over the next couple of generations?

Kripal: I don’t know an answer to that. I think it could get pretty bad. I don’t have a rosy picture of things. I think religion has essentially been taken over by fundamentalists, and I think that’s a very bad thing—in a moral sense, in a political sense, in a cultural sense.

But I also think the opposite move—the secular, reductive, debunking move—is equally fundamentalist. The two feed each other. If you’re going to deny all spiritual or religious dimensions of the human being, you’re going to push people into fundamentalism. I see those two poles as very much related. Both of those options are nonstarters. I think they’ll take us down a very bad path.

What I’m trying to do—and what I hope a lot of us are trying to do—is create some kind of third space in the middle. It’s not about literal belief. It’s not about materialist debunking. It’s about trying to talk about the spiritual components of the human being in a sophisticated way.

 

* For a discussion of Henry Corbin, see Rasoul Sorkhabi, “Henry Corbin’s Discovery of the Imaginal Realm in Sufism,” in Quest, summer 2024.

 

---

VOLUME 113, NUMBER 2

CONTENTS

How to Think Impossibly: An Interview with Jeffrey Kripal
Richard Smoley

The Vision of W.B. Yeats
Gary Lachman

The Daimon in Pre-Socratic and Platonic Thought
Dominic Bucci

Plutarch on Serenity of Mind
Erica Georgiades

Fire and The Spirits of Fire
Geoffrey Hodson

"I Got Everything from 'The Secret Doctrine": Modrian and Theosophy-A Misunderstood Relationship
Massimo Introvigne

Pekka Ervast: A Finnish Theosophist
Antti Savinatnen

From the Editor's Desk

Members' Forum: Demian, Daimon, and Theosophy--Navigating Hermann Hess's Vision of Spiritual Awakening
Suanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer

---

An Outline of The Secret Doctrine
Franz Hartmann
Translated by Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer
N.p: European School of Theosophy Press, 2024. 202 pp., paper, $20.50.

H.P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine intimidates many readers. Consequently, a number of guides and introductions to it have been published over the years.

The latest to appear in English is An Outline of the Secret Doctrine by the early Theosophist Franz Hartmann (1838‒1912). For more on Hartmann, see the article by Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer, TSA board member and translator of the work reviewed here, in the winter 2022 issue of Quest, Franz Hartmann: A Pioneer of the Theosophical Movement  . Hartmann’s book has recently been translated as part of a larger project to make his works available in English (see article in this issue).

Hartmann had the highest opinion of The Secret Doctrine. This edition reproduces a note he wrote in 1889: “My dear H.P.B. Your ‘Secret Doctrine’ will be ‘The Bible’ of the coming millennium.”

As the introduction to this book by Doss McDavid points out, “While it does present the Stanzas [of Dzyan] in sequential order, the accompanying commentary is not merely a shortened version of HPB’s explanation but rather a completely new exegesis, written by a friend who had spent hours with HPB, listening to her serious teaching and everyday banter while all the time absorbing her views on the nature of the world.”

Hartmann’s view of the Stanzas is distinctive in at least a couple of respects. He provides remarkably clear explanations of abstruse concepts and symbols. For example, “Fohat, the personification of the electric life force, the transcendental one, serves as the binding that connects all cosmic forces. It can also be considered as the energy of the sun, the electric life-giving fluid, and the fourth principle known as the animal soul of nature.” And “the ‘dragon’ or ‘serpent’ signifies a living, moving, intelligent force and essence, and is therefore the symbol of spiritual (‘superhuman’) intelligences or ‘spiritual men,’ whether these forces manifest in a visible material body or whether they are in the state of Nirmanakaya” (emphasis in both passages is Hartmann’s).

There is one striking difference between Hartmann’s and HPB’s views: Blavatsky not only rejected the notion of a personal God but avoided the use of the word God in most of her writings. Hartmann, on the other hand, uses it freely, citing German mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme. He writes, “The Secret Doctrine asserts that the entire creation is a manifestation of the divine nature, originating from the breath of the Godhead”—here identifying the Godhead (a term used by Meister Eckhart) with what Blavatsky calls the “Absolute.” This does not reveal any great discrepancy between Hartmann’s views and HPB’s: it rather indicates that he is more likely to use terminology from the Western than the Eastern version of the esoteric tradition.

One particularly enjoyable feature of this book is an appendix giving Hartmann’s brief autobiography. His verbal portrait of HPB is apt: “To me she always appeared as a great spirit, a sage and initiate inhabiting the body of a grown-up capricious child, very amiable on the whole but at times very irascible, ambitious, of an impetuous temper, but easily led and caring nothing for conventionalities of any kind.” This account describes HPB concisely and objectively—which is particularly valuable for a figure who has been bandied about back and forth so much between scoffers and idolizers.

In short, this volume presents not only a succinct and insightful glimpse into The Secret Doctrine but an account of the life of Hartmann, an extremely influential but sometimes overlooked figure in early Theosophy. (A short introduction to his life and works by Robert Hütwohl appears at the front of this volume.)

In my opinion, the most comprehensive study of Blavatsky’s book remains The Divine Plan by Geoffrey A. Barborka, first published in 1961. Nevertheless, Hartmann’s perspective not only presents the Stanzas of Dzyan in concise form but sheds important light on Theosophy, particularly in relation to the Western esoteric tradition, and on a man who was a fascinating figure in his own right.

Richard Smoley

           

 

---